So much of who we are stays hidden, like footpaths in a dark forest. Some of those hidden paths we acknowledge to ourselves, but most we don’t even know exist and are shocked to see them revealed in the light of day. Claire had wandered those footpaths in the dark her whole life, they were her domain, her safety, and in the absence of light she’d learned their footholds and their stepping stones by touch alone. She’d learned the fragrances of the dark, and its sounds, and they were all familiar and comforting, those harbingers of her inner world.
Artist Claire had allowed her hidden footpaths to lead her out of the dark and the layers of the ‘Claire onion’ suddenly revealed themselves in her paintings. Just as suddenly she didn’t understand who she was anymore, she couldn’t recognize this reflected self who stared back at her from every canvas and whose subtle personality suffused the message in all of them.
Her dark forest looked kind of beautiful in the light of day, but strange and alienating, and those feelings she could now identify and understand felt like they belonged to another person. You can’t shift perspective on reality and expect it to still feel like home, nobody can. One is naked in the light; naked, vulnerable, ashamed and afraid. All the splendor of the world can’t drown the humiliation of being exposed just the way you are, just the way you’ve always been, and found lacking. Everybody is found lacking, nobody is ever good enough for the harsh blaze of the truth.
We make up for our inadequacies, best we can, and pretend we don’t mind being stripped of all of our defenses, though we do, and we go on, naked and afraid, both faker and more real than before, because we don’t have a choice.
There is a devastating quality to this revealing light which annihilates everything you thought and felt about yourself and makes you uncomfortable, an impostor in your own life. Everything about you that is not broken recedes into the background while your inadequacies bask in full glory, and the worst part about this is that even in its unrepentant cruelty the rest of the world feels more genuine than you.
